1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to mobile communications networks and an apparatus and a method for content retrieval for presentation in a television browser environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The introduction of enhanced bitrates available in 3G and 4G networks have made it meaningful to use television as a browser display for mobile terminals. Content may be retrieved over a radio connection provided by a 3G or a 4G cellular radio access network for presentation on a television display connected to a mobile terminal such as a mobile phone. Examples of the 3G and 4G radio access network technologies are the Universal Mobile Communication System (UMTS) and the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standardized by the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP). A UMTS radio access network provides bitrates up to 14 Mbit/s with the HSDPA feature and up to 42.2 Mbit/s in a dual-cell and up to 84.4 Mbit/s in a dual-cell with Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas. The dual-cell is supported by the 3GPP release 8 and MIMO by 3GPP release 7. One of the main objectives of the LTE is the providing of downlink data rates of at least 100 Mbps and uplink date rates of at least 50 Mbps. As of 11 May 2011 over two thirds of the 398 commercial Highspeed Packet Access (HSPA) operators support peak downlink bitrate of at least 7.2 Mbit/s. However, in most cases the average bitrates supported continuously for most of the users fall far below the maximum bitrates made available by the standards.
A problem with the present Internet portals and services is that they have not been tailored for use in mobile terminal based browsers. In many cases the Internet portals present graphics, video and animation intensive main pages. Even if the main pages would download tolerably fast, the navigation to more specific services or to more specific content categories requires further downloading and further delays. For each of the more specific content categories there may be further portals with graphics, video and animation intensive main pages. Even if the download speed would be sufficient as such to provide tolerable delays, there may appear delays in the service provider side in the answering of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests from clients. In some cases where a television is used as a display for a mobile terminal browser, the users might appreciate the possibility of changing quickly from the viewing of television programs to the viewing of Internet content on the television screen and back to the viewing of television programs. The changing might occur, for example, during commercials in between the television programs.
It would be beneficial to be able to obtain content for quick viewing in particular in mobile terminal based browsers that use a television display to present the content.